Automate feature deployment with CI/CD applications
In the world of IT, DevOps plays an increasingly prominent role as it offers the means to expedite delivery of value and increase platform stability. More importantly, it reduces cost and risk of errors. With the release of Paris, you can now integrate CI/CD apps to automate and standardize the process of deploying features and functionalities on your ServiceNow instance.
Historically, ServiceNow deployments can entail a fair amount of manual work (think: runbooks and testing). They also lack process standardization, which in turn, results in occasional errors or production issues. So, we asked ourselves: why not apply the proven DevOps principles for ServiceNow development? And that’s how our 4DevOps application was born, a CI/CD connector for ServiceNow!
Challenges in the pre-DevOps release and deployment process
It’s no secret that ServiceNow Dev/Ops teams spend 20-50% of their time managing and deploying update sets. Below are some of the key challenges that a pre-DevOps release and deployment process presents:
- Dealing with multiple dev environments is difficult and error-prone
- Infrequent cloning leads to misaligned environments, conflicts and unreproducible issues
- Multiple teams have different processes, conventions, standards and practices, or in other words, a lack of standardization
- Manual testing is labor-intensive with slow feedback loops and poor test coverage
- Manual runbooks like Microsoft Word/Excel are labor-intensive and error-prone
In the end, there’s a lot of inefficient use of resources (manual labor), slow delivery (impacting all your platform users), and quality of deployments at stake.
Connecting the dots with 4DevOps for ServiceNow
By levering our CI/CD connector for ServiceNow, a pipeline can be set up and integrated to create a true DevOps delivery process for ServiceNow. 4DevOps combines the capabilities of GIT version control, world-class CI/CD pipeline tools (GitLab, Azure DevOps), an Automated Testing Framework (ATF) and ServiceNow DevOps apps to unlock the value of DevOps for ServiceNow deployments.
Benefits of our CI/CD app
- Automation
106X faster deployments by structuring and automating the deployment process
- Stability
86% less incidents caused by deployments
- Efficient delivery
30% time savings by eliminating manual activities
- Testing efficiency
43% less time spent on testing by applying automated testing from the CI/CD pipelines
Jim Austin